The Manhattan Institute remains committed to state and local fiscal reform. To continue to follow my work and that of Steve Malanga, Dan DiSalvo, and all our other colleagues, please visit manhattan-institute.org (@ManhattanInst) and city-journal.org (@CityJournal). Any PSI-related inquiries may be directed to seide[at]manhattan-institute.org.

John Moorlach owes it all to Half Dome.
The outgoing Orange County Supervisor, who has spent the past two decades reforming his county’s finances, might’ve been just some CPA with a habit of kvetching about politics.
“I went on a hike in Yosemite Valley with a friend, …

The Manhattan Institute has decided to wind down Publicsectorinc.org, as part of a broad, institution-wide effort to consolidate our various platforms. The last date of publication will be two weeks from now, on December 15th.
PSI went live in late 2010, when the pension and public employee union issues …

by Gregory A. Stein and Wayne Winegarden
Filing for bankruptcy is not, by itself, a solution. Bankruptcy just creates time and breathing room to renegotiate obligations and enact reforms. It is this process of rearranging municipal balance sheets that, ultimately, restores solvency. But, if political interests …

Rhode Island Governor-elect Gina Raimondo rose to political prominence engineering a difficult pension reform in the Ocean State back in 2011. Now one of her challenges as governor will be grappling with a state budget deficit that, by her calculation, will be much larger if the courts overturn those reforms after a long legal battle…

State Budget Solutions just released a new report analyzing the funding status of pension systems across the country. The news is far from good. The report, which incorporates data from more than 250 pension plans in all 50 states, estimates pension funding levels far more …

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has been keen to show how he his different from his predecessor Michael Bloomberg. As I’ve argued elsewhere, nowhere is this clearer than in school policy. This is even reflected in the ease with which teachers are now getting tenure.
Bloomberg …

A new poll finds that half of all New Jersey residents say they plan to leave the state, compared to just 45 percent who want to stay. The desire to leave is particularly strong among working age people, reflecting the state’s more than 10 years of economic struggles. Some three-in-ten who say they want to leave specifically blame the state’s high taxes for their desire to leave…

Capably fulfilling journalism’s obligation to be “the first draft of history,” The Detroit Free Press yesterday published an 8,000-word account of how the city’s bankruptcy was resolved. This “backstory” bookends “How Detroit went Broke“ (6,000 words; September 2013),” in which Free Press reporters explained the …